New Books in Mathematics21 Maalis 2022

Stephen B. Heard, "The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed." (Princeton UP, 2022)

Listen to this interview of Stephen Heard, Professor of Biology at the University of New Brunswick. We talk about his book The Scientist’s Guide to Writing: How to Write More Easily and Effectively Throughout Your Scientific Career, 2nd ed. (Princeton UP, 2022), we talk about writing when it's a verb, we talk about writing when it's a choice, and we talk about writing when it's the science.

Stephen Heard : "Especially for early-career scientists there's a risk of their writing entering into a positive feedback loop with the writing as it is in the literature. And really, we do this to them, we professors and instructors. We say, 'Next week, you're going to hand in a lab report. Write out this experiment you did,' and we say, quote, 'and write like the scientific literature,' unquote. Well, that's a horrible thing to tell anyone to do, because unfortunately, much of our literature isn't particularly well written. We love our acronyms, we love really long noun phrases, we love the passive voice, and so on. And so, people who don't make conscious choices and just sort of model what they're writing on what's already out there — I think they sort of get locked into some of those bad decisions, like the five-noun noun phrase. So being aware of what you're doing, thinking about the language you're using, and being willing to use the language to its fullest — that's not an invitation to write your own Finnegans Wake — but it is an invitation to think carefully about the way of constructing your point that will resonate best with the reader."

Readers may be interested in Heard's webpage for the book.

Watch Daniel edit your science here. Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com.

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Pablo F. Gomez, "Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

In my conversation with Professor Pablo F. Gómez about his new book, Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality, published by the University of Chicago Pre...

20 Syys 52min

Xiaochang Li, "Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture...

2 Syys 40min

Richard Elwes, "Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7" (Basic Books, 2026)

What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, th...

22 Touko 1h 3min

Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

Most of us today would assume that morality and ethics, being value propositions, are questions for inspired leaders, religious creeds, poets—in other words, for the humanities. But what if I told you...

17 Touko 1h 10min

Counter-Revolutionary Puzzles with Guillermo Badia

In this episode Pat speaks with Dr Guillermo Badia. Dr Guillermo Badia is a philosopher working in logic. His research interests are logic in computer science, semiring-based logics and models of comp...

11 Touko 29min

Antony Valentini, "Beyond the Quantum: A Quest for the Origin and Hidden Meaning of Quantum Mechanics" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Based on decades of research, Beyond the Quantum: A Quest for the Origin and Hidden Meaning of Quantum Mechanics (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a panoramic rethink of quantum physics, with potentially revol...

5 Touko 1h 30min

Raffaele Danna, "The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals: How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200–1600" (Harvard UP, 2026)

In the thirteenth-century Mediterranean, commerce transformed as merchants shifted from Roman to Indo-Arabic numerals—an alternative that better facilitated complex calculations. It has long been know...

28 Huhti 1h 6min

Antonio Padilla, "Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity" (FSG,2022)

A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Ei...

15 Helmi 1h 2min